Making Sense of Literacy

What is Morphological Awareness?

To understand this concept, you must first know what a morpheme is. Put simply, it is the smallest unit of meaning in a word. As an example, if we have the word "swordfish", the two morphemes in this word are "sword" and "fish" because both on their own have meanings as words by themselves.  This form of combining morphemes is called lexical compounding, and it is a useful tool for readers to read and even create their own words. If we know the morphemes "eye" and "ball", we would naturally put together that the meaning of "eyeball" is literally a ball in your eye (gross!) But that is a rather simplistic way of thinking of morphemes, as they come in many shapes and sizes. 

Another form of morphology is inflectional morphology, which is when words are given grammatical sense by combining their stems (the base word) with grammatical suffixes. Let's say we generically learn that the "-ed" spelling at the end of words denotes past tense (in English this is annoyingly not always the case). If we have the word "punch," we know that "punched" may be the past tense because we have attached the past tense suffix "-ed" to the stem of this word. The idea is similar to lexical compounding, but while lexical compounding combines meaningful words, inflection applies grammatical changes to words.

The final form of morphology is  derivational morphology, which is the formation of new words using the same affixes, however an important difference is that they are used to create entirely new words whereas inflectional morphemes only modify the original stem. As an example, the words "paternal" and "patricide" both share the same prefix "pat-" which means "father", giving hint to what the meaning of the word is. 

So to recap, there are three major forms of morphological awareness:

• Lexical compounding: the ability to combine different morphemes into meaningful words

• Inflectional morphology: understanding how grammatical morphemes modify words

• Derivational morphology: creating words with combinations of morphemes and affixes

For now it isn't totally necessary to know the difference between these three. The important thing to remember is that being able to combine units of meaning is super helpful for reading, especially in the case of ambiguous terms. Using an example from above, some may see the word "patricide" and not know the prefix "pat" and it's associated meaning. Reading this word becomes a much more uphill battle, especially if they also don't know that "-cide" usually is associated with killing, in this case "the killing of a father." On the contrary, knowing these two chunks of information is much easier to remember and allows one to read this word with some guesswork if they have never been exposed to it already.
However, this is an example of how morphemes work in English. Does this work the same way in Chinese? Check out the video below, and see if you can see if the assumptions for this video hold for Chinese characters.

You may have noticed some pecularities when comparing English to something like Chinese. Chinese, for example, does not have spaces around each character, and thus recognizing morphemes or words in Chinese may require different reading skills. Read further to see what other differences arise between Chinese and English.

 This is likely not by accident, as evidenced by the comparison we made earlier between the languages. But why? First, unlike English letters, which combine phonological sounds with a number of letters to create a word, each Chinese character is a self-contained morpheme. What this means is that when you see a single character, it's meaning is 1-to-1. For example, the character 火 means "fire"" and the character 山 means "mountain." Because of the ease of access to morphemes in these two characters, we can combine these literally to make "fire mountain", or it's true meaning: volcano. Second, Chinese characters do not have inflectional or derivational morphology, as grammar in Chinese is usually designated with context-dependent characters. For example, the character 過 usually follows a verb when it is a completed action. If we know the character 聼 means "hear", we could then surmise that 聽過 means "heard." Notice that while this achieves something similar to inflectional morphology, it does not physically alter the characters in any way. They are still standalone characters.
So the answer to our previous question is that morphological awareness seems important across written languages, but this manifests in different ways. Do these rules apply to second language learners of Chinese?

Some research has shown that CSL students have similar reading development regarding this skill. One meta-analysis conducted by researchers at Shaanxi Normal University attempted to look at four primary reading skills in CSL students: phonological awareness, morphological awareness, orthographic awareness, and rapid automatized naming (RAN). Aggregating around ten different studies, they investigated what the association was between these skills and reading ability. Morphological awareness had a moderate association with reading, indicating that compounding characters in Chinese generally helps CSL students read. This makes sense given that CSL students lack the necessary oral language skills that their native Chinese speaking students have. To fill the gap, CSL students may combine characters that they do know in order to derive meaning and creating vocabulary with sets of characters while reading. For example, a CSL student may know that the character 河 means "river" and that 馬 means "horse", and when put together "river horse" literally becomes "hippopotamus." While they may not guess this meaning right away, it may give them a useful way to remember vocabularly they read in the future.
An interesting finding from this meta-analysis is that the effects of morphological awareness on reading were greater for adult learners, but did not differ significantly by age. This seems to at least indicate to a degree that this skill is fairly robust across the age span for assisting struggling CSL readers, but may in some minor part help adults more. Interestingly, this learning can sometimes be unintentional. One study showed that English-speaking adult CSL learners acquired a sensitivity to the morphological structure of Chinese characters after three years of formal instruction. This seems to indicate that CSL learners may benefit both from implicit and explicit instruction. Finally, their study seemed to indicate that English morphological awareness did not predict much in terms of Chinese morphological awareness. This stands to reason given our previous examination of the differences among English and Chinese writing.
However, this seems to be an understudied aspect of CSL reading. While evidence does seem to suggest that there is a seeming effect of morphological awareness on reading, this relationship needs to be studied more to know how robust this relationship really is.

How Can We Apply This Knowledge to Our Own CSL Students?

Some may wonder what the practical implications of such research may be. While there are not a lot of intervention studies which have investigated the direct effects of morphological awareness training on reading ability, at least some research has pointed to benefits. One intervention study conducted by researchers at the Chinese University of Hong Kong showed that out of three reading interventions employed in their study, the group of students who were trained on compounding characters had the most substantial gains in reading ability. Another study conducted by Dr. Yanling Zhou at the Education University of Hong Kong showed that CSL readers trained on compounding characters not only improved their reading, but also improved their writing. This is not entirely surprising given that reading and writing, while requiring some different skills, share strong associations with each other.
So how can parents and educators move this research out of the lab and into the classroom? A wealth of research has shown that a student's home literacy environment shapes how they learn to read. Critical components typically examined for home literacy environment include access to literacy resources and parent education, but an often examined component of this process is the formal and informal literacy practices that parents pass on to their children. Parents who wish to improve morphological awareness skills in their CSL children may consider modeling this in some way when reading to their children. For example, they may break down words in a systematic way using compounding rules in order to convey the meaningfulness of combining characters to form meaning. This can be a structured activity conducted over a short period of time or sprinkled into reading time whenever it is useful.
Another very practical and fun way of training these skills can be accomplished with a little gamification of student learning.  What is gamification of learning? As you may have already guessed, gamification of learning is simply when educators apply game-like elements to learning to make learning interactive and fun. An abundance of research has shown that gamifying learning has shown considerable benefits for students due to the way it engages student learning. By transforming what students learn in the classroom into a fun activity, this also makes the experience less painful for the parents, who often have to find ways to make this learning process easier on their own.
One way CSL students can gamify the learning of morphological awareness is through the use of Bumper Cards, which are cards designed by literacy researchers for training Chinese character compounding skills. The objective of the game is simple. Players are given a set of one-character words in Chinese and must try to combine them as each player discards their words. Whoever can make the most meaningful words gets more tokens. This creates a token-based reward system that makes learning characters and their combinations more fun and enjoyable. More on this game can be found at the below video.

Summary

Hopefully you have learned a fair deal about morphological awareness and how it relates to literacy. Given the information we know, it seems that this skill is an important part of reading and writing, but how it influences different languages like Chinese may vary. Additionally, training CSL students on how to compound characters has been shown to provide some benefits to their reading ability. By gamifying the learning process, we may also overcome the hurdle of having to teach these rules explicitly to those who may benefit.

References

• Chen, X., & Zhao, J. (2022). Reading-related skills associated with acquisition of Chinese as a second/foreign language: A meta-analysis. Frontiers in Psychology, 13(783964). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.783964

• Ho, J. C.-S., Hung, Y.-S., & Kwan, L. Y.-Y. (2021). The impact of peer competition and collaboration on gamified learning performance in educational settings: A meta-analytical study. Education and Information Technologies. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-021-10770-2

• Ke, S., & Koda, K. (2021). Transfer facilitation effects of morphological awareness on multicharacter word reading in Chinese as a foreign language. Applied Psycholinguistics, 42, 1263–1286. https://doi.org/10.1017/S014271642100031X

• Lee, J. W., Wolters, A., & Grace Kim, Y.-S. (2022). The relations of morphological awareness with language and literacy skills vary depending on orthographic depth and nature of morphological awareness. Review of Educational Research, 1–31. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543221123816

• McBride, C. A. (2016). Is Chinese special? Four aspects of Chinese literacy acquisition that might distinguish learning Chinese from learning alphabetic orthographies. Educational Psychology Review, 28, 523–549. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-015-9318-2

• Ruan, Y., Georgiou, G. K., Song, S., Li, Y., & Shu, H. (2018). Does writing system influence the associations between phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and reading? A meta-analysis. Journal of Educational Psychology, 110(2), 180–202. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000216

• Senechal, M., & LeFevre, J.-A. (2002). Parental involvement in the development of children’s reading skill: A five-year longitudinal study. Child Development, 73(2), 445–460. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8624.00417

• Zhou, Y. (2021). The effect of dialogic reading paired with multisensory learning of Chinese characters and morphological awareness skills for L2 Chinese young learners at Hong Kong kindergartens. Foreign Language Annals, 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1111/flan.12570

• Zhou, Y.-L., McBride-Chang, C., Fong, C. Y.-C., Wong, T. T.-Y., & Cheung, S. K. (2012). A comparison of phonological awareness, lexical compounding, and homophone training for Chinese word reading in Hong Kong kindergartners. Early Education & Development, 23(4), 475–492. https://doi.org/10.1080/10409289.2010.530478